Roy The Broken Journey

A Life of Scotland, 1976-1999
1. Auflage 2016
ISBN: 978-0-85790-342-6
Verlag: Birlinn
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 528 Seiten

This is the second volume of Kenneth Roy's magisterial trilogy on the history of Scotland since the Second World War. The first volume, The Invisible Spirit: A Life of Post-War Scotland 1945-75, was met with immediate acclaim. This new volume brings the story much closer to the present day and traces enthrallingly the social, political and cultural threads which lead directly to the Scotland we live in today. Along the way the author describes the oil boom in Shetland, Scotland's doomed campaign at the World Cup in Argentina, the Orkney child sex abuse scandal, the Lockerbie bombing, the massacre of schoolchildren and a teacher at Dunblane, the cloning of Dolly the sheep, and much more. Kenneth Roy uses his record of events to mount a searing critique of the Scottish body politic of the time and its key personalities and institutions. In sparkling, often very funny prose the country is anatomized in a way which will make uncomfortable reading for many current politicians and public office-holders today. The book culminates in a referendum and the inauguration of the new Scottish parliament. Echoes of present-day aspirations, antagonisms and concerns are all too evident.

Kenneth Roy was born and brought up in Falkirk, Scotland. After ten years working as an anchorman in BBC TV News and Current Affairs he became a critic and columnist in the print media, notably Scotland on Sunday and the Observer. He founded the Institute of Contemporary Scotland in 2000; was editor and now columnist of online campaigning journal the Scottish Review; and is chair of the Young Scotland programme, which encourages debate and exchange of ideas among young adults in Scotland. He is the author of The Invisible Spirit and The Broken Journey.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Roy, Kenneth

Leseproben

1977

LILYBANK TO LERWICK

I

A YEAR AFTER THE DISAPPEARANCE OF RENEE MACRAE, A YEAR IN which the police had sifted through thousands of reports, witness statements, maps and photographs in their futile search for the wife and three-year-old son of an Inverness businessman, a promising discovery was made in a water-filled quarry on the south side of Culloden Moor. An underwater TV camera designed to operate in pitch darkness produced, from 40 feet down, a five-second shot of a bundle wrapped in sacking, apparently standing upright in the water. Some who examined the grainy image claimed to detect the outline of a human face – the remains of eyebrows, eye sockets, a nose and a gaping mouth. ‘Could this be Renee or Andrew?’ asked the newspapers. Bemused readers were invited to judge for themselves.

At its height, the search for the MacRaes involved a hundred officers of the small Northern Constabulary, frogmen, an RAF jet, police dogs from Lancashire which had been trained to find buried bodies, as well as many civilian volunteers. It yielded nothing; not a trace of the mother and child was found. Officially it remained a case of two missing persons – but that formality deluded no-one in Inverness, least of all the police. The MacRaes were dead and buried. The question was where.

Renee MacRae – 36 years old, blonde, petite, always smartly dressed – was last seen alive leaving the office of her husband’s building firm at 5 pm on Friday 12 November 1976. The couple had been living apart for a year, though on amicable terms. Gordon MacRae had given her a car – a BMW – and a house.

Little was known of her movements later that evening. Between 7 pm and 8 pm, her car was seen parked near a hotel about seven miles south of Inverness; around 10 pm, a driver stopped in a layby on the A9 to investigate a flicker of flames. He was horrified to discover a burnt-out BMW and a large bloodstain in the boot. Andrew’s push-chair was missing from the boot, and there was no sign of mother or son.

Renee MacRae had told friends that she was planning to drive to Kilmarnock to visit her sister, returning on Monday to pick up her older child from school. Only her best friend, Valerie Stevenson, knew the truth: that she intended to spend the weekend in Perth with her married lover Bill McDowall, company secretary of her husband’s company, so that he and Andrew could get to know each other better.

Six days after the discovery of the burnt-out car, McDowall admitted that he and Renee had been having an affair. He promptly left Gordon MacRae’s employment and surprised the police by turning up at their Inverness headquarters to volunteer a statement. Before he could do so, his wife marched into the interview room and dragged him away, telling the police to leave him alone.

McDowall, who had an alibi provided by his wife, maintained that he had made an arrangement to meet Renee but had a change of heart and had not kept the appointment. Valerie Stevenson told the police that Renee had been besotted with McDowall for the four years of their relationship, but Valerie was not sure he felt as committed as Renee did. Valerie doubted the sincerity of McDowall’s promise to Renee that they would run away together and start a new life in Shetland, where he said he had found a job in the oil industry.

A year later, Bill McDowall had indeed found a job in the oil industry, but not in Shetland. He had become a globe-trotting executive and was living in London with his wife and two children, far from the accusing fingers and chattering tongues of Inverness. The ‘Where are they now?’ posters in the shops had turned yellow, Renee’s luxury bungalow had been sold, and the police inquiry had run into the sand. In the absence of any fresh leads, there was only speculation – and plenty of it.

Despite the appearance of intense activity, not everyone was convinced that the police had pursued their initial inquiries with the thoroughness that might have been expected. It emerged much later that a few weeks after the MacRaes’ disappearance, a police sergeant, John Cathcart, had smelled decomposing flesh in a quarry at Dalnagarry, close to where the car was found. He reported it to his superiors, yet was subsequently told to stop digging. No reason was ever given. ‘The machine we were hiring had to go back’, he said, ‘so I assumed the motive was financial’. Such was the scale of the investigation and the intense public interest, this seemed unlikely.

The various theories contradicted each other. Witnesses said they had seen a man dragging what looked like a body into woods surrounding the quarry. Contrary to the impression given by John Cathcart, senior officers suspected that both bodies were buried in the quarry but moved before the police arrived at the scene. An elderly farmer took his divining rods to Dalnagarry and declared the bodies to be under a track. Later the farmer decided they were not under a track but buried under the A9, which was being upgraded at the time. The police dismissed this theory, although it continued to be a popular one locally.

For a few days in November 1977, the image in the water held out the best hope of solving the case. Gordon MacRae told journalists that he hoped his wife’s body would be found: ‘I am sure she is dead. I don’t think there is any question of that. If she had been alive she would have contacted someone within days of her disappearance.’ But the police were cautious. ‘There’s a great danger of seeing what one wants to see,’ warned the head of Northern CID, John Cameron. He was right: when a team of Royal Navy divers located the sack they found nothing sinister. ‘We must presume,’ said Cameron, ‘that the bundles, one with what appeared to be the outline of a human face, are sacks of garden rubbish. The search for Mrs MacRae will go on. This inquiry will not be closed until we find this woman and child.’

Three years later, in October 1980, Gordon MacRae let it be known that he had divorced his missing wife and that he intended to re-marry a former receptionist in his company. The other principal character, Bill McDowall, kept a low profile. The inquiry, though still notionally open, was dormant. Years passed.

By the summer of 2004, when it was re-activated, Renee MacRae would have been 64. The police announced out of the blue that their bodies might have been dumped in the quarry at Dalnagarry. This was scarcely news: Dalnagarry had been the primary focus of the investigation at the outset. But the search abandoned in 1976 when the digger had to be returned was now resumed with a vengeance. Two thousand trees were cleared, 20,000 tons of earth moved, in preparation for a search of the quarry bottom. A forensic scientist at Dundee University, Professor Sue Black, undertook a comprehensive trawl of the case papers in preparation for what might be turned up at the quarry. Nothing was. The excavation produced two crisp packets, some men’s clothing and rabbit bones. Six months later, in January 2005, the police made a further announcement: they were on the point of naming a suspect and sending a report to the procurator fiscal. Nothing came of that either.

II

The heady scent of illicit sexual intrigue, the setting of the scandal in the middle-class business community of the Highlands, the enigma of the woman at the centre of it, the enduring mystery of her last hours, the odd twists and turns of the investigation, and most of all the growing realisation that a perfect murder had been committed – these ingredients combined to make the MacRae case endlessly fascinating. Fascinating – but otherwise of no great significance. In contrast, two premature deaths in 1977 were concerned with brave innovations in Scottish life – and the difficulty of sustaining them.

On a November evening, a Glasgow actress, Katy Gardner, former wife of a playwright, Edward Boyd, received a telephone call from Sir William Murray, the baronet of Ochtertyre in Perthshire. ‘Katy, I am going to shoot myself’ were his only words before Gardner heard gunfire. She contacted the police and two constables from Crieff arrived at the sixteenth-century mansion around 2.40 am. They found Murray’s body with the gun at his side. He had died instantly of head wounds.

He had seemed cheerful enough the night before his death as he dished out tickets for a BBC quiz programme which was due to take place in the little theatre he had created in part of the house. But his air of unconcern was deceptive. Deep in debt, Murray was being harried by the Inland Revenue for £25,000 – unpaid capital gains tax incurred over a number of years on the sale of land. And there had been a lot of it to sell. When he came of age in the 1960s ‘Sir Willie’ inherited a family estate of 14,500 acres as well as the historic house of Ochtertyre, where Robert Burns once stayed and which inspired him to write one or two poems about Murray’s ancestors.

Sir Willie himself would have been worthy of an elegy. The young man’s inheritance had included a bank overdraft and death duties; in order to pay them off he was forced to sell two farms almost immediately. But his subsequent problems were all his own making. Restless and flamboyant, he lacked the temperament for the life of a Perthshire landowner. Instead he poured money into a succession of disastrous business enterprises. Over the years he kept herds of pedigree Herefords, shipped lobsters to France, ran a film company and invested in motor racing. The year before he died, he helped to organise a Scottish expedition to explore caves in South America.

He was no more successful in love than he was in business. His first marriage ended in divorce and his...